towards individuals whom she hopes to convert, Rome never changes in her attitude towards Churches whose very existence is a continuing challenge to her theory. What Newman wrote to Pusey in 1868 is equally true, and equally apposite, to-day :

I don't think that at Rome they will attend to anything which comes from one person, or several persons, however distinguished. If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to say, 'I will become a Catholic if you will just tell me whether what I have drawn up is not consistent with your definitions of faith,' the only question in answer would be, 'Do you speak simply as an individual or in the name of the Anglican Church? ' If he said, 'As an individual,' they would not even look at his paper. (Vide Life of Pusey, vol. iv., p. 154.)

While, then, approaches to Rome must needs be resultless so far as that Church is concerned, they are far indeed from being without effect on the Church of England. It is not merely (though this is a grave matter) that the legitimacy of the Roman conception of Christianity is inevitably and almost unwittingly conceded, and the reunion of the Churches treated as a subject for diplomatic arrangement between hierarchies rather than as a religious issue in which the very character of the Christian revelation is at stake, but also the rift between clergy and laity within the Church of England is widened. A wrong direction is given to the thoughts and hopes of many Churchmen by these alluring but necessarily futile efforts. Those who take part in them are carried inevitably and perhaps unconsciously so far away from the traditions and standpoints of their fellow-Churchmen that their own influence is gravely lessened, and their own Churchmanship gravely compromised. Attention is widely diverted from the problem of religious division which is really troubling Christian consciences and weakening Christian influence. History, in explaining the breaches of Christendom, goes far to heal them, but the vested interests of sects and individuals which keep alive the separations which have lost intelligible justification, embittering politics, embarrassing local government, destroying the kindly intercourse of Christian neighbours, hindering the common action of good people for social objects which all approve, are baleful facts which confront men in the places where they live, and call urgently for removal in the interest of religion itself. This is no exaggerated description of the problem of reunion as it presents itself to ordinary English Churchmen and Nonconformists. That problem was urgent before the war. The war has made it almost intolerable. It must be solved, and solved quickly, by the authorities of the Churches, or the rank and file will break away in irrepressible disgust. Outside the little sophisticated coteries of Anglo-Catholics' reunion with

Rome is unthinkable; and reunion with the East is too remote to arouse anything but a languid concern. Neither Roman Catholics nor Easterns enter into the daily life of ordinary Christian folk in England. There is no active hostility felt to the first, nor anything but a genuine goodwill toward the last; but the type of Christianity which both profess is so alien from the use and wont of English Churchmen that the division of the Churches brings no burden on their consciences. After all, Roman Catholics are still few in the land, and Eastern Christians are unknown, but Nonconformists are found everywhere, and hardly a family of the middle and lower classes is not divided in its religious allegiance. There is no offence to conscience in ecclesiastical separations which really express differences of fundamental belief, for conscience itself insists on placing loyalty to truth above submission to authority, but when the fundamental beliefs of the separated bodies are known to be identical, then their separation is felt to be morally offensive. And this is precisely how the matter stands with Nonconformists and Anglicans. Therefore it is the breach with Nonconformists that disturbs conscience, because it troubles life. Reunion between Christian neighbours is the urgent, it will soon be the irresistible, demand of the Christian conscience itself. The clergy of the Churches, even if they wish it, will not be able much longer to keep the exhausted schisms alive.

Of course, this popular view of the religious problem implicit in our unhappy divisions' ignores important factors which must be reckoned with in any serious effort to reunite the sundered fragments of the Christian society. If it be true that reunion is primarily for every English Christian a local question, and that until it has been answered locally it has not been really answered at all, it is also true that in the modern world every local question, as well secular as religious, has world-wide ramifications, and that these must perforce enter into a sound and permanently satisfying answer. The denomination must be dealt with as well as the parish, the religious theory as well as the vested interest, the tendency as well as the fact. And these non-local factors may be the most intractable of all. Again, reunion is pursued by considering men, not merely for its practical advantages, though these be considerable, but for the promise it seems to offer of a way of escape from the besieging perplexities of the modern world. How, save by the concentrated thought and effort of the whole Christian fellowship, shall the traditional faith and morality of Christendom (which are now confessedly failing to retain their hold on men's minds) be so correlated with modern knowledge, and applied to modern conditions of life, as again to command general acceptance?

The Christian tradition, under which civilisation as we know it grew and flourished, seems to be ' petering out' in the infinitely trivial conflicts of the Churches, amid the mockery of the base and the despair of the noble. For verily no tolerable alternative is anywhere perceptible. Might not a reunited Church rise to the height of its vocation, and prove itself again the light and salt of the world? When such possibilities are present to the mind, the question of the ultimate object aimed at by those who would reunite the Church of Christ becomes paramount and insistent. Between the conception of reunion which inspires negotiations with the Roman hierarchy and that which yearns for harmony in the parishes there is a difference of kind. The one gives primary place to uniformity of ecclesiastical system; the other fastens first on the fundamental fact of common discipleship. The one seeks to unify from without; the other from within. The religion of the letter stands out again in its sharp distinctness from the religion of the spirit.

What is the kind of united Church which we are aiming at ? This is the point upon which the acute and powerful mind of the Irish Primate has fastened in his message to the Church of Ireland, and it is a point which needs to be insisted upon with the more emphasis since it is so little remembered by ecclesiastical diplomatists:

We are bound to ask the question, What sort of Christian Church do we desire to see emerging from the reuniting of the forces of Christendom? If such a reunion should come about, this question is of vital importance, though it has been but little considered by those who have been working towards unity. My own conviction is that if a reunion led to the creating or restoring of a universal hierarchical system, dominating human life in all its parts, and dictating doctrine and practice with professedly infallible authority, it would be the greatest disaster which could possibly befall mankind. What could be more fatal for the Church than that it should identify its aims with a system which the world once for all rejected?

I conclude, therefore, that the only kind of reunion we should desire is that which, while holding fast the Christianity of Christ as given in the Gospel, secures ample liberty not only for every individual, but for every type of organised Christian life which has proved really effective in bringing the influence of Christ to bear upon human life. It is not desirable that any one Church should absorb the rest. I conclude, therefore, that these overtures or conversations, or whatever they were, are, as things stand, not likely to help us towards the only reunion we should desire. (Vide Times, January 5, 1924.)

Archbishop D'Arcy in these strong, manly words is but endorsing the 'vision' which he confessed at the Lambeth Conference when he gave his vote for the Appeal :

The vision which rises before us is that of a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all truth, and gathering into its fellowship all' who profess and

call themselves Christians,' within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common, and made serviceable to the whole body of Christ. Within this unity Christian Communions now separated from one another would retain much that has long been distinctive in their methods of worship and service. It is through a rich diversity of life and devotion that the unity of the whole fellowship will be fulfilled.

HERBERT DUNELM.

POLITICS AND POLITICIANS TO-DAY

I. LABOUR AND THE Dragon

'OF what colour is the dragon?' asked the elders of Penguin Island of the inhabitants of Alca. And the inhabitants replied, 'Red,' 'Green,' 'Blue,' ' Yellow.' 'Its colour? It has no colour.' 'It is dragon-coloured.' If our civilisation were wiped out to-day the historian of the future, when he sat down to write, from contemporary records, the history of the rise and progress of the British Labour movement, would probably find himself in an embarrassment quite as distressing as that of the elders of Penguin Island. He would rise, yawning, from the perusal of the yellowing pages of the Labour Research Department's reports, and start to find the staid compilers of these rows and rows of solemn statistics denounced, on the authority of apparently responsible statesmen, as desperate men engaged in a frantic conspiracy for the destruction of society. Friend and foe would combine to assure him that the movement, which first became a formidable force in British politics shortly before the war, was a new movement. If he were intelligent and well documented, he would be inclined to suspect, on the contrary, that it had its roots in the very beginning of English history, in the ancient days when Piers Plowman told the knight,' Though he be thine underling here, well may hap in heaven that he be worthier set and with more bliss than thou. . . . For in Charnel at church churls be evil to know, and a knight from a knave there.' Damnatory ecclesiastics and others would assure him again that the movement was a foreign one, begotten in the brain of a malignant German Jew, supported by Russian gold, and aimed deliberately at the ruin of the British Empire. Once more, if he were intelligent or even merely lucky, he might catch a glimpse behind the façade of foreign jargon and rather lukewarm internationalism of a spirit as intensely English as any that anywhere exists: the curious spirit which is never really happy till it has translated the very Beatitudes into terms of beef and beer, and never quite at ease till it has invested these homely commodities with a sort of moral radiance. It is the spirit which once informed the astounded